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From Anti-Vaxxer Moms to Militia Men: Influence Operations, Narrative Weaponization, and the Fracturing of American Identity

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From Anti-Vaxxer Moms to Militia Men: Influence Operations, Narrative Weaponization, and the Fracturing of American Identity From Anti-Vaxxer Moms to Militia Men: Influence Operations, Narrative Weaponization, and the Fracturing of American Identity Dana Weinberg, PhD (contact) & Jessica Dawson, PhD ABSTRACT How in 2020 were anti-vaxxer moms mobilized to attend reopen protests alongside armed militia men? This paper explores the power of weaponized narratives on social media both to create and polarize communities and to mobilize collective action and even violence. We propose that focusing on invocation of specific narratives and the patterns of narrative combination provides insight into the shared sense of identity and meaning different groups derive from these narratives. We then develop the WARP (Weaponize, Activate, Radicalize, Persuade) framework for understanding the strategic deployment and presentation of narratives in relation to group identity building and individual responses. The approach and framework provide powerful tools for investigating the way narratives may be used both to speak to a core audience of believers while also introducing and engaging new and even initially unreceptive audience segments to potent cultural messages, potentially inducting them into a process of radicalization and mobilization. (149 words) Keywords: influence operations, narrative, social media, radicalization, weaponized narratives 1 Introduction In the spring of 2020, several FB groups coalesced around protests of states’ coronavirus- related shutdowns. Many of these FB pages developed in a concerted action by gun-rights activists (Stanley-Becker and Romm 2020). The FB groups ostensibly started as a forum for people to express their discontent with their state’s shutdown policies, but the bulk of their membership hailed from outside the targeted local communities. Moreover, these online groups quickly devolved to hotbeds of conspiracy theories, malign information, and hate speech (Finkelstein et al. 2020; Perry, Whitehead, and Grubbs 2020; Thomas and Zhang 2020). In addition to voicing concerns about economic issues and individual rights, these groups actively rejected evolving medical advice about recommended precautions such as masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19, promoting both distrust and misinformation. Their messages have been spread aggressively by bots and trolls, similar to Russian patterns of interference in the 2016 election, leading to speculation of involvement by foreign actors like Russsia or China, if not in organizing the groups than in amplifying and promoting them (Benson 2020).Through online publicity of their offline activities, the FB groups exaggerated the reach and size of both the community against quarantine as well as those in support of various fringe ideologies (Beskow and Carley 2019; Timberg, Dwoskin, and Balingit 2020). Moreover, in addition to mobilizing people to show up at local protests, these groups have been linked to real world violence (Schulte and Eggert 2020; Wood 2020). Social media has the potential to bring together communities as well as to polarize them, both in the virtual world and in the real world (Benkler, Faris, and Roberts 2018). The algorithms of profit-driven social media platforms encourage both community building and polarization (Tufekci 2018), promoting content that encourages active and extended engagement in order to make audiences available to advertisers (Zuboff 2019). Consequently, online engagement reinforces underlying preferences, beliefs, and group membership, creating an echo-chamber while distancing us from others who are not like us. It also provides opportunities for geographically and socially distant groups and individuals with common interests to find one another as well as opportunities for inauthentic actors to fake identities and exploit these online interaction. Thus, social media provides an unprecedented tool for building collective identity among a wide array of interest groups and, in malign cases, for social manipulation and even social cyber warfare (Beskow and Carley 2019). Aside from understanding that social media influencers may magnify the reach and even the resonance of particular messages (McDonald, Bail, and Tavory 2017), we have yet to understand why some messages resonate strongly enough to influence behavior on- and off-line. How, for example, did the FB reopen groups persuade anti-vaxxer moms vocally concerned about the safety of vaccines for children to attend reopen protests alongside armed militia men, protesting government restriction of personal freedom of movement? Why did the groups’ false information and conspiracy theories spread faster and further on social media than accurate information? How were their messages so potent that they encouraged, not only attendance at protests, but prolonged online engagement well beyond the protests and even offline acts of violence? Previous research suggests the answer lies in large part in the identity-invoking narratives embedded in social media messages. Taking a cultural sociology approach, we define narratives as stories from which we derive cultural meaning, whether in relation to broader culture or to our individual “scripts of self” (Lamont 2019). In this paper, we argue that narratives are a powerful tool in the affinity-focused social media environment for building group cohesion, deepening 2 conflict, and influencing behavior. We contend that actors, both foreign and domestic, are leveraging and manipulating narratives in an effort to exacerbate existing schisms in American society. We explore how narratives are being used to make destabilizing messages appeal to mainstream audiences, and we advocate an approach to studying social media and other types of messaging that examines narrative content and narrative combinations and adjacencies. We then propose a theoretical framework for deep and rigorous investigation of narrative content in social media and other types of persuasive messaging, in particular the role of weaponized narratives, in creating messages that resonate deeply enough with people to shape behavior and identities both online and offline, leading in extreme cases to radicalization. Foreign and Domestic Malign Influence Operations and the Role of Narrative Since at least 2014, Russia has engaged in a dedicated influence operation against the United States (116th Congress 2017; Greenberg 2019; Pomerantsev 2019; Samuels 2018). Although the approach is distinctly modern in its use of social media platforms, the methods align with old Soviet doctrine using information warfare to gain a strategic edge over competitors (Bagge 2019; Department of State 1987; Gioe, Lovering, and Pachesny 2020; Greenberg 2019). The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee suggests that the purpose of this ongoing operation has been to sow discord and undermine Americans’ trust in democratic institutions (116th Congress 2017). This concerted operation serves to create a potent fifth column of “useful idiots” (Gioe 2018; Jankowicz 2020b; Michael 2019). In keeping with classic Soviet disinformation tactics (Rid 2020), social media enables current Russian influence operations to enlist large swaths of the American public as witting or unwitting accomplices in spreading and legitimating misinformation and subversive content that serves to exacerbate existing schisms in American society. The Russians are not the only foreign power engaged in social cyber warfare with the US. Other foreign powers are also engaged in information warfare on social media, with Twitter having identified information operations with roots in China, Iran, and Turkey for example (Chamberlain 2020; Twitter Transparency Center 2020). At the same time, domestic extremist and terrorist groups are launching their own influence campaigns (Department of Homeland Security 2009; Goldenberg and Finkelstein 2020). These operations may plant narrative seeds of discord and radicalism in or our communities, but they may also reap and amplify existing, homegrown narratives. Counter-cultural groups on Reddit and elsewhere sometimes describe their activities as “slipping red pills to normies” (Nagle 2017). This is a reference to the Matrix movies, in which the protagonist is offered a red pill that will change his view of everything. Facebook (FB) groups and subReddits have become places where “normies” and “newbies” are exposed to more fringe messages along with other more benign messages that might have attracted them in the first place (Farrell et al. 2020; Shepherd 2020). A growing body of research in cultural sociology has pointed to the persuasive and identity-building capacities of narratives for social movements and the way activists and stigmatized groups make strategic use of narratives, or storytelling, to shape understandings and mobilize participants (Braddock 2020b). As Polletta points out, “storytelling is able to secure a sympathetic hearing for positions unlikely to gain such a hearing otherwise” (Polletta 2009:105) in large part because stories are open to interpretation. Characteristically ambiguous in their moral, narratives invite others to attribute their own meaning, thereby making new or minority ideas or opinions less antagonistic or threatening (see also (Polletta and Chen 2012)). 3 Beyond a vehicle for relatively benign introduction of new ideas, narratives also have the capacity to engage new recruits (Polletta 1998). Successful claims to legitimacy require close adherence to dominant cultural codes (Alexander and Smith 1993; Smith 2010), driving the strategic decisions actors make about conforming to and challenging culture
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